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The soul of Cordova

"The reality today is that if the commercial fishery collapses,
Cordova is in serious trouble," warns Kristin Smith. She is the
head of the Copper River Watershed Project, a community group
working to broaden and better manage the area's economy while
preserving the natural environment of the watershed and the fishery
for commercial, subsistence, and sport uses.

Smith thinks tourism is part of the answer. While there's no
mistaking Cordova for anything but a commercial fishing town, it is
close to some of the state's most spectacular scenery. There is
excellent birding in April and May, with pristine fishing, hiking,
and kayaking all summer.

Some landowners in the Copper River Watershed are looking to its
natural resources for more immediate returns, however. Chugach
Alaska Corporation, which manages 308,000 acres in the watershed on
behalf of Native Alaskan shareholders, has proposed a road and
logging project that environmentalists claim would threaten
salmon-spawning streams and the Copper River fishery.

The issue isn't simple. "We want to create an economy here so
our kids won't have to go to Los Angeles to get a job," says John
F. C. Johnson, corporate vice president of cultural resources for
Chugach Alaska. "For us, the almighty dollar is not the bottom
line. Salmon are important. Our children are important. We've been
here for 5,000 years, and we know that you don't destroy the nest
you sleep in."

Not all of the region's Native Alaskans believe that development
is the answer. "There are roughly 17 million acres within the
Copper River Watershed, and very little of it is protected from
development," says Dune Lankard, an Eyak Indian with the Eyak
Preservation Council. "These corporate Indians think that clear-cut
logging, oil drilling, strip mining, and selling land are the only
ways to make money for native shareholders," he says. Lankard looks
to responsibly managed ecotourism and a sustainable, healthy salmon
fishery as sources of income that can be developed without
sacrificing the environment.

"Salmon are to the native people of Alaska's coastal temperate
rain forest like the buffalo were to the Plains Indians," Lankard
says. "If we lose the wild salmon, we will lose the spiritual
connection to our home."

The way of the salmon

The ocean's tide is turning as Covel heads back to Cordova. Far
upriver the forested flanks of the cloud-draped Chugach Mountains
are broken by the cracked blue ice of glaciers. Like most true
anglers, Covel may have been disappointed in the day's catch, but
he still loved the fishing. "I followed my stomach here in 1980,"
he says with a boyish grin as he guns the boat up the channel. "And
then I discovered that there's no more beautiful place to go to
work."

The watershed is beautiful. Visitors can drive the 50 miles of
mostly gravel road out to see the salmon-counting sonar station and
the Million Dollar Bridge at the road's end. Built in 1910 for a
railroad carrying copper ore from the Kennecott Mine to the port in
Cordova, the bridge partly collapsed at its north end during the
1964 earthquake ― one reason a proposed road to Cordova has
never been built. From the bridge's deck, you can see the wide,
crenulated face of Miles Glacier 4 miles to the east and the
imposing, blue-crevassed flank of Childs Glacier barely 1 mile to
the west ― a million-dollar view. The immensity of the
landscape and the power of the roiling, silt-gray river leave one
wondering how such a fishery could ever disappear.

The eradication of a wild salmon run would have been
inconceivable to Lewis and Clark, too, when they first witnessed
the run on the even mightier Columbia River in 1805. Biologist Jim
Lichatowich estimates that at least 192 separate salmon and
steelhead trout populations, or stocks, spawned in the Columbia
River system at that time ― roughly 10 million to 16 million
fish. Today 67 of those stocks are extinct, 36 are highly
endangered, and 50 more are at risk. Only the ghost of a wild
salmon run ― estimated at less than half a million wild
spawning fish last year ― remains.

The Columbia, of course, is only one of many imperiled rivers in
the West. And Cordova is only one of many struggling fishing towns.
But if Cordovans can protect their salmon, then maybe other
communities will take a new look at their own dying waterways. Wild
salmon are more than a sustainable, renewable source of food. They
symbolize not only the health and beauty of a free-flowing river,
but the wisdom of native cultures and the simple rewards of a
rapidly vanishing way of life.